Telecommunications service providers continually increase the number of services and products they offer to customers. In a typical scenario, each product/service offered to customers may include its own commercial off the shelf (COTS) data collection and billing unit.
One problem associated with using a standard COTS data collection and billing unit is that the format of the collected data and the subsequently generated billing information is typically incompatible with the telecommunications service provider's billing system. In this case, the service provider is often forced to replace its legacy billing system (i.e., an existing system) in order to use the billing data or make dramatic changes to the legacy billing system to accept the billing data.